The Gipper Read online

  In 1926, Notre Dame appeared to be on its way to a possible unbeaten season after winning its first eight games, seven of them shutouts. In the second to last game, against Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, Notre Dame was a heavy favorite, and Rockne decided to turn over the coaching reins to Hunk Anderson who, along with former teammate Tom Lieb, had joined Rockne as assistant coaches. Rockne, meanwhile, would go to Chicago to see the Army-Navy game. He had been talked into doing so by his new agent, Christy Walsh (now also the ghostwriter of Rockne’s weekly syndicated column), who had arranged for publicity photos to be taken of Rockne, Pop Warner, then the coach at Stanford, and Yale coach Tad Jones. It turned out to be one of Rockne’s biggest mistakes, and, although Anderson followed Rockne’s instructions, his absence may indeed have cost him an unbeaten season. Anderson was a great line coach, but not in Rockne’s league—hardly anyone was—as a head coach, especially on game day.

  Rockne’s decision to let Anderson take over while he was in Chicago proved a potent motivating tool for Carnegie Tech’s part-time coach Chicago judge Wally Steffen. Before the game, Steffen, seizing on what he felt was a golden opportunity, told his players, “Rockne thinks you’re so bad that he’s gone to Chicago to see some real football players in the Army-Navy game.”

  Steffen’s pep talk was all the Tartans needed as they proceeded to upset Notre Dame, 27-17. When Rockne got word of the final score at Soldier Field, he blanched, incredulous at the result and furious at himself for having gone to Chicago rather than coach his own team. The Irish had a chance to finish on a winning note the following Saturday against Southern California at the Los Angeles Coliseum, but with two minutes to play, the Irish trailed, 12-7. Rockne shocked everyone at that point when he sent seldom-used, fourth-string, 145-pound, ambidextrous quarterback Art Parisien into the game. Rockne’s theory was that the USC defense would be confused by a quarterback who could pass with either hand. He was right, and, with time running out, Parisien threw a touchdown pass—with his left arm—to halfback Butch Niemiec that enabled Notre Dame to win, 13-12, and finish the season at 9-1. Despite that heroic achievement, Parisien, then one of the few Notre Dame football players from New England—in his case, Haverhill, Massachusetts—felt he would still not see much action with the Irish the following season and transferred to Boston University. Meanwhile, elated as he was over the dramatic victory over USC, the loss to Carnegie Tech the previous week would haunt Rockne for much of the off-season.

  Despite the embarrassment of the Carnegie Tech loss, Rockne was pleased to have Anderson and Lieb join the Notre Dame coaching staff. After graduating with a degree in engineering, Anderson had gone from being a 170-pound guard at Notre Dame to a 190-pound professional lineman. Following four years as the head line coach at Notre Dame, Anderson, a Rockne favorite, became the head coach at St. Louis University. In 1930, he would return to Notre Dame as Rockne’s assistant, and then serve as head coach from 1931 through the 1933 season. After three years as the head coach at North Carolina State, Anderson served as line coach with the Detroit Lions and the Chicago Bears of the NFL. From 1942-1945, Anderson was the head coach of the Bears while George Halas was in the service during World War II. It was an opportune time to be with the Bears, who won the NFL title in 1940, 1941, and 1943, and finished as runner-up in 1942. Anderson was a co-coach with Luke Johnsos of the 1943 championship team. “Hunk was the best defensive coach in the history of the NFL,” said Halas, the Bears’ founder and longtime coach. Anderson is also credited with devising the “blitz,” wherein a defensive back or a linebacker bolts through a hole in the offensive line, and other novel defensive schemes.

  Anderson, elected to the College Hall of Fame as a guard, was one of about a dozen of Gipp’s Notre Dame teammates who went on to coach on the college or professional level, many of them with distinction at major universities. Four other Gipp teammates, three linemen and a quarterback, were elected to the College Football Hall of Fame for their distinguished coaching careers: Eddie Anderson, who coached at Holy Cross, Iowa, and DePaul and later became a prominent surgeon; Edward “Slip” Madigan, who turned tiny St. Mary’s College in northern California into a nationally known school when he coached the Galloping Gaels to a victory over a powerful Fordham team that included Vince Lombardi in 1930 and also recorded victories over West Coast football powerhouses like California, UCLA, and Southern California; and Lawrence “Buck” Shaw, who after a College Hall of Fame coaching career at Santa Clara and the University of California became the first head coach of the San Francisco 49ers and later coached the Philadelphia Eagles, whom he took to an NFL title in 1960, their last to date. Shaw also became the first head coach at the Air Force Academy; and Frank Thomas, who became a College Hall of Fame coach at Alabama and whose order to punt as a quarterback with the Notre Dame freshman team in 1916 Gipp defied and instead kicked a 62-yard field goal.

  One other Gipp teammate, halfback Norm Barry, spent three years playing in the NFL, two with his hometown Chicago Cardinals and one with the Green Bay Packers while at the same time attending law school. After coaching the Cardinals in 1925 and 1926, Barry became a superior court judge in Chicago. End Roger Kiley, also a Chicago native, played one season with the Cardinals and then coached at Loyola University in his native Chicago before becoming a state and then federal judge in his hometown.

  Former Gipp roommate Dutch Bergman coached both Catholic University and the NFL’s Washington Redskins, while Harry Mehre, Jim Phelan, Joe Brandy, and Chet Wynne, also teammates of Gipp, each coached on the college level. Curley Lambeau, of course, became the founder and a player and coach with the Green Bay Packers. Other coaches who had played for Rockne in the 1920s included Lieb, Frank Leahy, Edgar “Rip” Miller, Frank Carideo, Marchy Schwartz, and Noble Kizer. All were disciples of the Rockne system and spread his coaching style and enthusiasm for football and his players across the country in the coming decades.

  “We were everywhere, but there was only one Rockne,” said Schwartz, an All-American running back in 1929 and 1930, who was an assistant coach at Notre Dame before becoming the head coach at Stanford in 1942.

  Among other Gipp teammates who did well after graduating from Notre Dame was Dave Hayes, a five-foot eight-inch, 160-pound end from Manchester, Connecticut, who hopped several freight trains to get to South Bend in 1916 and played alongside Gipp as a freshman that year. Like many of his teammates, Hayes went off to war in 1918 and, after being wounded in action in France in 1918, returned to Notre Dame the next year. Upon graduating in 1921, Hayes, who held several part-time jobs while at Notre Dame, presented a check for $250 to President Burns toward a university building fund. “I came here broke on a freight train, Father,” Hayes told Burns, “and I’m leaving the same way.” As it turned out, Hayes became successful in business in the Hartford area. Several years later, Hayes’s young son died while holding onto the miniature gold football that Rockne had given to all members of the undefeated 1919 team. Hearing about the tragedy, Hunk Anderson, then the Notre Dame coach, sent his own gold football to Hayes with a letter of condolence. It was the same miniature football that Anderson’s then fiancée, Marie Martin, asked Anderson for—only to be rebuffed—after she claimed to have seen Gipp’s then girlfriend, Iris Trippeer, wearing one that Gipp had apparently given to her in early 1920.

  Having outgrown Cullum Field at West Point, Notre Dame and Army decided to move their rivalry to New York in 1923. The first game was played before a near-capacity crowd of around 35,000 at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, then the home of the Brooklyn Robins of the National League, who later became the Dodgers. The second game, played in Manhattan on October 18, 1924, at the Polo Grounds, the home park of the New York Giants baseball team, attracted a larger crowd, a capacity gathering of 55,000. An even bigger crowd of about 65,000 turned out for the third New York City game, and the first at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. Those large crowds, which mainly seemed to be made up of Notre Dame supporters—perhaps because of the city’s large Irish
population—were an indication that the school’s “subway alumni” was continuing to grow. (Notre Dame administrators preferred to use the somewhat derogatory term “synthetic alumni.”) From that game in 1925 through 1946 every game between Army and Notre Dame was played at Yankee Stadium with crowds of upward of 80,000, except for the 1930 game, which was played at Soldier Field in Chicago before an estimated 110,000 spectators.

  The 1946 game, though it ended in a 0-0 tie, is regarded as a classic, since it matched the country’s two best teams, including the eventual national championship Cadets, who were led by the great backfield tandem of All-Americans Felix “Doc” Blanchard and Glenn Davis—the fabled “Mr. Inside” and “Mr. Outside”—while the Notre Dame lineup included All-Americans Johnny Lujack, the Irish quarterback, and fullback and defensive end Leon Hart. After 1946, the schools met only twice more in New York—at two-year-old Shea Stadium in 1965 and at Yankee Stadium in 1969. In their only other games in the New York area, Army and Notre Dame played twice at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1983 and 1995. A scheduled meeting between the two schools in November 2010 was to be their first in New York since 1969 and the first at the new Yankee Stadium. It was also to be the fiftieth meeting between the two schools.

  Strangely enough, the most storied game between Army and Notre Dame did not come about from the game itself, but became immortalized by a legendary oration by Knute Rockne. With a 4-2 record and what Rockne regarded as his weakest team ever, Notre Dame came into the 1928 game at Yankee Stadium on November 10 as a prohibitive underdog to an undefeated Army team before a capacity crowd of 78,000. Before the game, Rockne, by then the most famous football coach in the country, gave what is generally regarded as the most famous pep talk of all time. Or at least that is the legend.

  Walking into the Yankee Stadium locker room following the pre-game practice, wearing his trademark fedora and tan overcoat and looking somber, Rockne, as usual, drew the attention of his players, even without saying a word. Once their spellbinding coach started talking, though, all forty players, along with some of his friends—including New York’s flamboyant mayor, Jimmy Walker; Ed Healey, a former All-American at Dartmouth; and a leading heavyweight boxer, Gunboat Smith—sat and stood mesmerized and enrapt, according to at least several eyewitnesses, as Rockne began to talk. “You’ve all heard of George Gipp, I presume,” he said softly. Naturally, they had, even though they’d been in grade school when Gipp played. After recounting Gipp’s great talent, his sudden illness near the end of his final season, his hospitalization, and his deathbed struggle, Rockne said, again softly, “You may not have heard what he told me that night, which I’m going to tell you now.” What none of them knew was that, according to Rockne, the day before he died Gipp had asked a final favor of Rockne: that he ask “the boys” on a day when things aren’t going right for the team to “win one for the Gipper. I’ve never told any team of that request before, but I’ve told you now.”

  Rockne then turned and, without another word, walked out of the locker room. For a few moments, the players sat on their stools in silence, most of them with their heads down. Then, suddenly, they let out a collective cheer and raced for the locker room door. Among them was Lawrence “Moon” Mullins, a sophomore fullback. “You can imagine the effect of that talk on me, a sophomore, going out to look at Army for the first time,” said Mullins who became a coach at Kansas and Loyola University in New Orleans and then a lieutenant commander in the Navy during World War II. “As we rushed out for the field, I passed Walker, Healey, and Smith, and I saw tears in the eyes of each one. Three men from three totally different spheres of life, all affected the same as we Notre Dame kids.”

  Some sources claimed Rockne’s “win one for the Gipper” talk was made at halftime of the game. But a number of others who were present when Rockne delivered his most inspirational talk agreed with Mullins. They included Ed Healey, a part-time assistant Notre Dame coach at the time, and Francis “Frank” Wallace.

  “Rock was terribly disturbed on the day of the game,” said Healey, a College Hall of Fame tackle at Dartmouth and later a Pro Football Hall of Famer with the Chicago Bears. “About five minutes before game time, he spoke to the team. He prefaced his remarks on the terrific Army team. Finally he recalled standing beside the deathbed of Gipp and told of reaching out his hand and listening to the dying athlete say, ‘Coach, when the going gets tough, especially against Army, win one for me.’ There was no one in the room that wasn’t crying, including Rockne and me. Then there was a moment of silence, and all of a sudden those players ran out of the dressing room and almost tore the hinges off the door.”

  Two years later, Rockne, in an article ghostwritten for him for Collier’s magazine, provided what became the oft-quoted classic “win one for the Gipper” request that the coach said Gipp had made while dying at St. Joseph Hospital in South Bend. The same quote would be included in Rockne’s autobiography, which was published in 1931.

  Still, there were doubters, especially among former teammates, that Gipp had ever asked Rockne to ask one of his teams to “win one for the Gipper” when prospects were bleak. Among them was Hunk Anderson, the last player to visit and talk to Gipp before he died. “I doubt very much if he would have said that,” Anderson told the author shortly before he died in 1978. Anderson and some others who knew him best said it would have been out of character for Gipp, even on his deathbed, to have made such a request to Rockne. It would have been more plausible and likely, some of them said, if Gipp had asked Rockne to put $500 on the Irish to win when Notre Dame was an underdog but had a good chance to win. But there were a few of Gipp’s teammates who thought it possible that Gipp did indeed intone the immortal exhortation. “I didn’t believe it for a long time,” Chet Grant, also interviewed in the late 1970s, told this writer, “but I now think it’s entirely possible that he said it.” So did President Ronald Reagan, who was to say that, while filming the movie Knute Rockne: All American, Rockne’s wife, Bonnie, told him that her husband had noted in his diary that during his deathbed conversation with the coach, Gipp had indeed asked that the team “win one for the Gipper.”

  Despite their motivation, stoked even higher by Rockne’s eloquent oration, the Notre Dame players still had to face an undefeated Army team who was favored by two touchdowns and was expected to win the national championship. One thing Notre Dame had in its favor was a “friendly” referee in Walter Eckersall. But if Notre Dame was to win, it would have to stop All-American halfback Chris “Red” Cagle. Like Elmer Oliphant, Harry “Light Horse” Wilson, and a number of other Army stars before him, Cagle had played varsity football elsewhere—in his case at Southwestern Louisiana—and now was in his third of four seasons at West Point, where, as at Southwestern Louisiana, he was an All-American. That Army used players who had played as many as four years of college football elsewhere is why it became a pariah to many schools who refused to play the Cadets. Even Navy temporarily put an end to its hallowed rivalry with Army in 1928 and 1929 because it adhered to the conventional three-year varsity eligibility system but Army did not.

  The Irish did stop Cagle in the first half, and even reached the Army 2-yard line before losing the ball on a fumble by fullback Fred Collins in what turned out to be a scoreless first half. In the third quarter, Cagle led Army on a drive that ended in the game’s first touchdown. But later in the period, in front of the overwhelmingly pro-Notre Dame crowd of 78,000, the Irish drove 52 yards to tie the score on a 1-yard plunge by halfback Jack Chevigny. After crossing the goal line, Chevigny tossed the football into the air and exultantly called out, “That’s one for the Gipper!” As Army had done, Notre Dame missed the extra point attempt, leaving the score knotted, 6-6.

  With tension mounting, and Notre Dame obviously playing with a fervent intensity, the Irish undertook their last offensive drive late in the fourth quarter. With the ball at the Army 35-yard line, Rockne sent in the seldom-used end Johnny O’Brien. At this time the rules forbade
an incoming player from talking to the quarterback, or anyone else, for that matter, so as not to relay a play from the coach. But halfback Butch Niemiec knew exactly what he had to do. On the next play, Niemiec rolled out to his right as O’Brien sprinted down the left sideline, cut inside (faking out five-foot nine-inch safety Bill Nave), and then cut back towards the sideline. From the 40-yard line, Niemiec fired a high and long pass to the speedy six-foot two-inch O’Brien, who caught the ball on the 2-yard line, juggling it slightly as he crossed the goal line to give the Fighting Irish the lead as the crowd erupted with a roar that could be heard across the Harlem River. Again, the Irish missed the extra point, and it was 12-6, Notre Dame.

  Army now had one last chance. Notre Dame’s kickoff inexplicably went to Cagle, one of the great Army runners of all time, and he ran it back 62 yards to the Irish 31-yard line on the home-plate side of Yankee Stadium. On the next play, Cagle darted and dashed to the Notre Dame 10, but then staggered off the field exhausted to cheers from the entire corps of West Point cadets. His substitute, Dick Hutchinson, completed a pass to the Irish 4-yard line, then plunged to within a yard of the goal line on fourth down and referee Eckersall blew his whistle ending the game. The Fighting Irish had prevailed, 12-6. The pro-Notre Dame crowd exploded with cheers, and hundreds of Irish supporters burst onto the field, tearing down the goalposts a foot away from where the game had ended. For his game-winning catch, O’Brien would go down in Notre Dame football lore as “One-Play O’Brien.” That was uncharitable, since O’Brien had already caught several other passes that season. But he had caught only one against Army; thus the sobriquet.